Intro to Zune Software
The Zune software manages and organizes your media library, whether it is audio, video, playlists, podcasts, or photos. It syncs your media files to the Microsoft Zune over a USB cable or via wireless. The software allows you to organize the metadata as well as pull metadata tag data for most content automatically. Compared to the previous Zune software version, version 2+ has been overhauled and “is built from the ground up.”

Installation
Although I have heard that some users came across a few issues when install the software, I however, did not have any problems. I am running Windows XP (Service Pack 2) with all the latest updates and the installation ran smoothly. The installation was quick and easy with very little work.

Zune Software
Okay, now for the juicy part of the review. One thing that you notice once you open up the Zune program is its clean and simple look. Don’t let the word simple fool you. Sometimes simple is better, and in this case it is. There are three main key parts to the program, the menu/navigation, media content, and playback controls.

The menu lets you navigate between your media connection, device, marketplace and social. These are further broken down into subcategories of music, podcasts, videos, pictures, and downloads. The Zune software does a good job in laying out your media files so it is easy to navigate and scroll through.

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Search
The search bar at the top right is a pretty handy feature if you want to find a particular media file. In addition, it searches simultaneously on the Zune Marketplace so you can purchase the song if you do not have it. My only slight criticism of the search is that it does not do a live search as found in Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes. The reason for this is that it also has to search the Zune Marketplace for what you type, so that will be a bottleneck.

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Playback
Putting the Zune software in a “Now Playing’ mode is really nice. In addition to displaying the album art, song, and artist to the song that is currently playing, it creates a wall of album art in your collection as the backdrop as shown below.

Playing videos, pictures and podcasts are similar to playing audio files, just without the wall art backdrop.

Podcasts
The Zune Podcasts is extremely handy. As someone on the go all the time, I do not have much time to sit in front of the computer or TV and watch or read all the latest news in computing, world and economy. Thus far, every morning I hook up my Zune to sync the latest podcasts from ABC World News, CNN News, The Economists, BusinessWeek, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Wall Street Confidential and many more as shown in the screenshot below.

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Although there is not quite the surplus of podcasts available to Zune compared to the iPod, you can be certain that there is still a vast amount of podcasts available and growing. There are many genres of music ranging from news, music, movies, comedy, health, sports, travel, business, international, politics, religion, etc.

Marketplace
I have not used the Zune Marketplace to purchase/download songs, but with my experiences with the Podcasts, I am sure downloading them is a smooth and easy process.

Conclusion
The Bad
Some things that the Zune software lacks are the ability to create smart playlists. Although there are workarounds to this by simply creating playlists in Windows Media Player with the file extension of *.m3u, but why go through the hassle, why not just have it built in? The playlist does lack great functionality. I would love to see the ability for users to create their own playlists such as playlists with most played songs, playlist by genre, year, rating, etc.

The software does not support any advance metadata tag editing. The most you can do is edit the artist, album, and song name in a basic manner. Thus you need to use Windows Media Player to do your tag editing (or similar software). This can be somewhat tedious to go back and forth between the two to make sure they are in sync.

In addition, I wish there was a more detailed status of the conversion process for videos with an estimated time remaining for the conversion and/or syncing process. Sometimes I have to wait 10-15 minutes per video on conversion (for 200MB+ video sizes), so it would be great if I knew how much time I had left.

The Good
Overall, the new Zune software is near solid, but like many software there is always room for improvement. The design is simple, yet elegant and the available content is great. It is easy to navigate and find what you are looking for while being visually appealing. I will keep “the good” brief as I have praised the software for many good things as I have stated above in my review. In addition, for the many of you who have large media libraries, the software seems to be able to handle it fine (for me at least), but it depends on your computer specifications/hardware. I am curious to see what the Zune team brings in future updates of the software.

Rating: 82 out of 100

My Zune.net profile: http://social.zune.net/member/JulianV86
Source (my blog): http://www.shadowsillusion.com/blog/

Coming soon is my Zune 2 review of both the hardware and software. In addition, I will post downloads, tips and tricks I come across with working with the Microsoft Zune (2nd generation) and its software. Stay tuned!

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